Contact me

Saturday, May 6, 2006

Final details and then a beer

I resanded Bender's Torso but this time I used my orbital sander being very careful not to go through the styrene. I was able to smooth out a lot of places that just didn't look right. After doing all this work, no sense in having flaws all over the place.

So today was also a day of completing a lot of smaller tasks. I completely redid the wrists. Yesterday I fiberglassed and bondoed them pretty good and used the table belt sander to smooth them out. Then a layer of styene was added to the front and a lot of spot putty layers were applied and sanded. After all that a nice coat of hammered silver and the wrists look great. I cut the hole in the top of the styrene with a hole saw.

On top of the door you could see the thin styrene and if you got close to Bender and looked down, it didn't look good. So I tried a bunch of calk for that area to build it up but all the caulk I had was old. So after pitching those in the trash, I mixed up some of this two part quikplastik stuff. Great for making a plastic / epoxy putty repair. After kneading it, I rolled it into a bead and laid it on top of the door. After getting my fingers wet, I was able to smooth it out on a bevel and it worked perfect. Now the door looks like a heavy duty metal door instead of a piece of flimsy styrene. This epoxy dries hard and is very tough. After it dried, I shot some paint on it and that was checked off the list.

The only thing I have to do now is to clean up the legs and feet and add a little paint. That will require taking Bender off the stand because I also need to finish the stand he's on.

Tomorrow he will be done and we will all open a beer to celebrate (Bender will have his own beer) Then I'll bring him in the house to join the other robots and creatures.